I can not get the game to even boot past the PA Launcher. When I hit play I just get a black screen. The help post says we need to have direct X 9 but that can not be installed on windows 8 pro. viewtopic.php?f=71&t=47593 It seams crazy that they required up to date operating systems then use an outdated direct X. This is a brand new system i7-4700 with GTX 770m so should have the power.
For the alpha it uses both. I think there are plans to remove the DirectX parts from the finished game. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I decided to risk skipping the first step and did the second even thou the first download wouldn't install. This is the "DirectX End-User Runtimes" and now the game will boot up. will also put this in the fix post incase someone else with a new computer hits this wall.
All of the DirectX runtimes have older libraries, so installing/updating DX11 on Win8 will also (re)install the DX9 libraries. If it moans about older DX libraries being missing, just update to whatever the latest is PA doesn't use Direct3D for graphics (as above it's OpenGL for the 3D renderer), but it likely does use DirectDraw, DirectPlay and/or DirectSound for the Windows code, as that's the easiest way to support various hardware knowing you'll have a standard feature set available. I doubt those will be removed at all, as they are providing Uber with a standard API to use the sound, graphics, or network hardware.
No, PA doesn't use DirectX for anything. But unfortunately Coherent UI (which based on Chromium Browser) need it for WebGL. Uber doesn't have source code license for Coherent, so they can't build it without Direct3D dependency. PS: Also if you have problems with installing DirectX 9 on Win8 you can try this trick: viewtopic.php?p=756018#p756018 Just remove D3D files and then redist will setup nicely.
Coherent is supposed to be multi-platform, any D3D "dependancy" should only manifest in the Windows client: Multi-platform support for DirectX and OpenGL rendering APIs, Windows, Mac, Linux, and .NET platforms. Having said that, I'd completely understand the Windows client using a WebGL -> D3D wrapper or something similar, which would create the DX9 dependancy. However it doesn't confirm what sound or network APIs are used, and on a Windows client it would make sense to leverage DirectSound and/or DirectPlay wrappers as well, which may also create a DX9 dependancy (independant of the graphics renderer). I've not done any proper coding for decades and I've not read any manuals for Coherent though, so any (or all) of the above may be utterly wrong Absolutely, each subsequent version of DirectX has libraries for the previous versions. Installing DX11 should give you a D3D 11 render path, plus libraries that support D3D10, D3D9 etc. It's that type of backwards compatibility that induces so much bloat though (do a search for d3d*.dll on a Windows 7 or 8 box to see what I mean )
PA uses FMOD for sound which is cross platform and not using DirectX. Also I sure that Uber using their own netwoking code instead of DirectPlay because I don't think that any standard libraries suitable for game with such a lot of bandwidth. Yeah you are right, but for some reason some people already have d3dx9_43.dll in their Win8 and it's different than d3dx9_43.dll which distributed in June 2010 DirectX Redistributable. And yeah, when DLL is wrong ABI is broken, game just crash on start. So problems happen not only because people don't have DLLs, but also because they have wrong versions of DLLs and standard web installer not replace them.
